


how to unring a bell

by starstrung



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Blindfolds, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 16:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16519976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: “I just want to be able to control it,” Caleb says. He hates that his power can do this. Take his own body away from him, make him do things. He thinks about Damien’s cheekbone giving way underneath his knuckles.





	how to unring a bell

**Author's Note:**

> For [Kathy](http://www.twitter.com/_anaeolist). To settle a debt.

The first time they do it, it isn’t even a sex thing. Not that Caleb doesn’t find it sexy. But it isn’t about that.

Adam’s parents finally give in and let him visit Caleb for a few hours. He’s barely seen Adam since Caleb attacked Damien — Adam’s parents have been keeping him away. When Caleb opens the front door and sees Adam, he just feels this palpable relaxing of tension, a heavy hand steadying his jumping pulse.

It feels like a flood. Caleb loves how Adam feels _so_ much, and when it’s all directed at him like it is now, it feels like he just won fifteen football matches in a row. Like he has wings or something. Like he’s Superman.

Adam pretty much falls into his arms, and Caleb sweeps him off his feet. Usually whenever Caleb does that, it makes Adam squeak and yell at him to be put down, but today Adam doesn’t seem to mind it. He’s got his face, like, buried into Caleb’s neck basically. It’s so fucking cute. Caleb missed him.

“I missed you,” Adam says, and the emotion rings between them like a bell.

They go up to Caleb’s room, and Adam kind of doesn’t really leave his arms at all, so when Caleb sits on his bed, Adam just stays curled up on his lap.

“Hey,” Caleb says, shy. Their faces are super close right now. God, Adam has such beautiful eyelashes.

Adam laughs a little, and Caleb feels fondness and warmth and concern and sadness from him— that familiar Adam sadness, the kind that makes Caleb feel like he’s watching Adam bleed out, and he can’t do anything about it. “Hey,” Adam says back, and kisses him.

Caleb melts into it right away. Adam’s a really good kisser. He does all these little licks into Caleb’s mouth, just the right amount of sweet, and Caleb loves the way he can feel the entire shock go through Adam’s body and his emotions when Caleb squeezes his thigh.

It just makes sense to lie back on the bed since Adam is already leaning his entire weight into him. Caleb doesn’t really think about it, just likes that it’s easier to keep kissing this way, and that Adam gets to lean over him now, which is nice. He _does_ start thinking about it though, when Adam’s thigh ends up slotted between Caleb’s legs.

It’s not fair. Caleb _always_ gets hard before Adam, sometimes even if they’re just kissing goodbye at the bus stop or something. It sucks. Caleb feels like he’s going through fucking puberty again, getting boners in the middle of algebra class for no reason.

Except it’s worse because of the feedback loop. He can feel how much Adam enjoys it, enjoys the way Caleb is holding him as they make out. Caleb can feel the jolt every time one of them slips and makes a noise, loud enough that Caleb is worried that Alice will hear. Adam gets turned on, and then Caleb gets turned on because of that and also because Adam is a _really good kisser_ , and then Adam gets even _more_ turned on because Caleb can’t help moaning about it. Long story short, it just feels like Caleb’s swimming in sensation, and because of that, his dick thinks it’s a good idea to start leaking a wet spot into his underwear, right where Adam’s leg is pressing against him.

“Yellow,” Caleb chokes out.

“Oh,” Adam says, and lifts himself up off of Caleb so he isn’t literally pressed all over him. “I’m so sorry, Caleb,” he says, and Caleb gets this huge pang of the guilt and anger that Adam directs at himself in that moment. Sharp and gutting and cruel, like Adam can be to himself.

“No, no, it’s okay, don’t worry, it isn’t your fault,” Caleb says, mortified. “It’s just a little fast, okay? God, this is embarrassing.” Caleb puts his arm over his eyes to hide how red he is. Luckily, Adam feeling like it was _his fault_ isn’t hot for him at all, so things are calming down.

“Oh,” Adam says, again, although this time Caleb can sense how relieved he is. “I mean I guess it is a little my fault.” He lies down next to Caleb on the bed, and he’s careful not to touch Caleb too much.

“Only because of how hot you are,” Caleb says sullenly. “It’s like my power just makes everything louder.”

“Hot?” Adam says, and Caleb can sense so much disbelief from him that he has to lift up his arm just to stare incredulously at him.

“Yeah, no shit you’re hot,” Caleb tells him. “I almost just came in my pants, Adam. Oh my god, don’t be _happy_ about that. Oh my god.” And now Caleb is blushing _again_ because Adam is — he really loves that Caleb got so close. Because of him.

“Why is this happening.” Caleb closes his eyes.

“I thought maybe you, I don’t know,” Adam says. Caleb feels Adam shrug.

“You thought I was just really bad at controlling myself?” Caleb’s voice climbs a little in pitch.

“Well, yeah!” Adam says. “Which is fine! We can’t all be, you know, great at it. I mean, we’re teenagers.”

“It’s not _me,_ ” Caleb tells him. “When I, you know,” he lowers his voice, “jerk off it’s not like that at all. It’s my power. It’s like I can feel everything that’s getting you off at the same time it’s getting me off, so it’s doubled. And then it all sort of bounces back between us, so then it, I don’t know, quadruples. Fuck, can we stop talking about this. I can feel how much you—”. Caleb stops short and tries to think about something other than sex with Adam. He’s glad he still has his eyes shut. If he could see the look on Adam’s face as well as feel all this _want_ coming from him, he’d probably lose it. If Adam wasn’t hard before, then he’s definitely hard now. And now Caleb has _another_ fucking empathy boner.

“We can talk about something else,” Adam says quickly, although Caleb can still feel how turned on he is, can hear that fucking gasp in his voice like he’s out of breath a little.

“I just want to be able to control it,” Caleb says. He hates that his power can do this. Take his own body away from him, make him do things. He thinks about Damien’s cheekbone giving way underneath his knuckles. He begins to shake a little, remembering.

“Woah, hey, Caleb,” Adam says, and Caleb feels him bury his panic, soothe his emotions. He carefully traces his fingers across Caleb’s face, like he’s checking to make sure that Caleb is okay.

Caleb keeps his eyes closed and focuses on his own breathing, like Dr. Bright taught him. He focuses on Adam, on the way he’s projecting all this calm at him. It works. It always works. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out.

They’re quiet for a moment. “Does it help when you close your eyes?” Adam asks him.

“Yeah,” Caleb sighs. Adam’s fingers cross over one closed eyelid, then the next. “It’s like I can focus on you better. It’s easier when I can’t see.”

“Hmm,” Adam says, like he’s considering something. His finger draws a line down Caleb’s nose.

Caleb opens one eye and peeks at him. “What?”

Adam feels nervous. Why does he feel nervous? Now Caleb is nervous. “Do you want to try something?” Adam asks. “If it’s weird, we don’t have to.”

“Um, okay. What is it?” Caleb says.

“Don’t laugh, alright?” Adam says, and he goes to Caleb’s dresser and finds his scarf. It’s the scarf Adam gave him as a gift, because Caleb lost his, and Adam kept making fun of him for looking like a turtle burrowing his neck into his sweater.

Adam ties the scarf around Caleb’s eyes.

“Adam,” Caleb says. “I told you I didn’t want to—”

“No this isn’t about that!” Adam says quickly. “I thought it might help you focus. You know. On me. Does it?”

Caleb wrinkles his nose. The weight on his face feels weird, and the wool of the scarf itches a little. But the heaviness — feels nice, he thinks. It’s different from just shutting his eyes. And he can feel Adam — his nervousness, how he wants to help Caleb feel better. In the absence of his sense of vision, it’s like his empathy sense opens up. Adam’s emotions feel like a calm sea, vast and all-encompassing.

Caleb sighs. “Yeah. But I might fall asleep,” he warns Adam.

Adam laughs, and it feels like a rock skipping on water. Caleb can’t help but grin with how good it feels. He can no longer tell where his emotions end and Adam’s begin. It doesn’t matter. He trusts Adam to feel for both of them.

“You look like you need the sleep, honestly,” Adam tells him. “You’re smiling. It’s working?”

“It’s working,” Caleb answers. “You’re so good at this. I knew you were a genius.” He could keep doing this all day — telling Adam nice things and feel this happiness rise in sync between both of them. A shared warmth, just between them.

“I love you,” Caleb says, and thinks he could climb a mountain with the rush that sends through both of them, together.

They don’t really talk much. Adam curls into Caleb’s side and reads an ebook on his phone with his head pillowed on Caleb’s arm, and Caleb doesn’t move, doesn’t see, just forgets everything except Adam.

Adam’s phone vibrating wakes him up. Caleb rubs his eyes, and then remembers that they’re blindfolded. “Shit. I fell asleep.”

“It’s okay,” Adam says. “I have to go, my parents are here.” He takes the scarf off of Caleb’s face, and Caleb squints at the sudden light.

“I didn’t mean to sleep through our only time together,” Caleb says, frowning. It’s strange to see Adam smile, instead of just feeling it.

“I’m glad it helped, Caleb. I’ll come over again soon, I promise.” He kisses Caleb and gets off the bed, begins to put on his shoes.

“And about the, uh, other thing,” Adam says, sounding casual, but Caleb can feel how careful he’s being.

“Are you seriously talking about my boner again?” Caleb says.

Adam rolls his eyes. “Well, not specifically about your boner, Caleb.”

Caleb narrows his eyes. “Okay,” he says.

“I’m just saying. It’s really not a big deal,” Adam tells him. He looks a little flustered, it’s really cute. “And I think I know what we need to do.”

Caleb makes a face. “What?”

Adam grins, and there’s more than a little mischief in it. “We just need to practice having sex a lot,” he says, and then he walks out of Caleb’s room and into the hallway, so that Caleb can’t even _yell_ at him about it.

  
  
  


  


The rest of the school year passes like a blur. Caleb has no idea how he manages to do everything — finish his classes, apply to college, play football — with all the other shit that’s happening in his life. Damien comes back. He comes back and then he leaves, and Caleb doesn’t hurt anyone.

He doesn’t lose control.

They graduate. Caleb wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the ceremony. It seems pretty dumb to wear a gown and a weird square hat and get a fake piece of paper that says you didn’t flunk high school. But being in that crowd with happy parents and his classmates as they celebrate feels pretty good. And after they throw their caps into the air, Adam looks at him across the stadium, and everything else kind of slows down.

It’s not even like Adam is smiling — he is. But it’s a different smile that Caleb hasn’t seen before, and he wishes he was closer to him so he could feel it, and figure out what it meant. He wants to know why Adam looks scared, for a split second.

  
  
  


  


They make the most of summer. Or they try to, at least. It’s hard to find time when it’s just them. Caleb can’t count the number of times they’ve had to break apart from each other and pretend like they _weren’t_ just making out in Adam’s room.

And then there’s this one magical week in the middle of July, where Adam’s parents have to go out of town to a neuroscience retreat upstate, leaving Adam home by himself.

Caleb’s dad looks at him for a long minute when Caleb asks him if he can stay over at Adam’s place for the week. Then he gets up and goes upstairs and comes back with a box of condoms.

“Dad!” Caleb says, appalled. He already had this talk like six years ago. He doesn’t need it again.

“No arguing. Just take it, and we can pretend this never happened,” his dad says, and they both do exactly that.

It’s so much different when they don’t have to worry about getting caught. It’s different spending the entire day together, sleeping together at night, waking up together in the morning. Caleb loves that Adam takes a long time to get out of bed in the morning. He didn’t know that, until now.

And they do spend a lot of time in Adam’s bed. Practicing, as Adam called it that one time. Caleb gets better — he doesn’t get as hard so quickly when they’re just kissing, but it’s still so fucking mortifying that sometimes all Adam has to do is rut against Caleb’s hip a little, and Caleb gets so overwhelmed by the rush of reverberating sensation that he comes in his pants.

Caleb lies down on the floor in shame. “You were just,” he says mournfully, “so into it.”

“Sorry, babe,” Adam says, although he doesn’t feel sorry at all, according to Caleb’s power.

Caleb glares up at him. “Do you… like this?”

Adam looks abashed. “Well, of course I do. I like having sex with you. You’re my boyfriend.”

“Is it really sex if I can barely last a minute?” Caleb asks him.

“It’s not sex unless both of us come,” Adam says decisively, which is as strong of a hint as Caleb needs to get off the floor and suck Adam off. At least he can still enjoy that.

Of course by the end it, Caleb is hard just from the feedback loop of it, and they get to do it all again.

  
  
  


  


Even though Caleb has had the most continuous sex in his life during this week, he still feels so frustrated, like it’s not enough. Adam’s patient with him through it, but every time Caleb gets overwhelmed two seconds into a handjob, he feels guilty that he can’t really reciprocate. He feels like a shitty boyfriend.

Also, he’s running out of clean underwear.

Caleb wakes up one morning already getting hard. He’s got a leg thrown over Adam, and he feels it when Adam wakes up.

“Mm, morning,” Adam says.

Caleb disentangles himself. “Sorry to wake you up. You can go back to sleep. I’m just going to, uh, take care of this,” he says, and gestures to the bathroom.

“No, wait,” Adam says, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. “I think I know something we can try.”

“Okay,” Caleb says, but he’s skeptical. It feels like they’ve tried everything — every possible permutation. It doesn’t matter if Caleb’s the one giving Adam a handjob or a blowjob — he still gets so overtaken by _feeling_ Adam’s pleasure along with his own that it’s usually over in a couple of minutes.

“It’s something that worked before,” Adam says, and he gets out of bed and comes back with a scarf.

“You’re kidding,” Caleb says, before Adam can even tie it on. “How’s this going to help? That’ll just make me feel it more.”

“Just trust me,” Adam says. “If you hate it, we can stop.”

Caleb is still not fully convinced, but he lets Adam tie the scarf around his eyes. It’s made out of cotton — more like a bandanna than the wool scarf they used before, so it feels less unwieldy on his face.

“Good?” Adam asks.

Caleb shrugs. “Yeah, good.”

“You should probably get undressed,” Adam tells him.

“You couldn’t tell me this first?” Caleb says, still a little unsure of this whole thing. But he takes off his sweatpants and his underwear and sits back down on the bed. He tries to read what Adam is feeling, but it’s hard to really gauge. Wonder, maybe? But there’s this kind of thrill to it.

“Okay, let me know how this feels,” Adam says.

Caleb waits, but Adam doesn’t touch him. He feels the bed shift as Adam gets back on the bed, but nothing other than that. “Wait, I don’t get it, what are you — _oh_.”

Adam is — he’s jerking off. Or something. Caleb assumes he must be, because he can _feel_ it, even though he can’t see it. He can feel that white hot pleasure, but diluted because it’s through his power alone. All he can hear from Adam is his breathing, a little rougher than usual, the sound of skin against skin.

It’s nothing compared to the way Caleb’s power is projecting it back at him. Adam must twist his hand, or tighten his grip or something, because for a half second the sensation is sharper, almost like a physical object in the way it hits him. It takes Caleb by surprise because, of course, he can’t _see_ Adam, and his dick twitches almost violently, just from feeling it secondhand.

“It feels — fuck,” Caleb says. He can’t even _see_ what’s happening. It’s not as powerful a feeling as when they’re both touching, but it’s still pretty fucking powerful. “God, I can feel it. I can feel you. It’s like you’re touching me, but you’re not. I’m just feeling you touch yourself.”

“Do you think,” Adam says, and Caleb can feel his hand speed up on his dick because everything lights up ten times more than before, “you could get off just from this?”

Caleb honest to god _whines_. Adam doesn’t really _do_ dirty talk. They’re both too embarrassed for it, and it’s not like Caleb can last long enough to have a dirty conversation during sex anyway. It’s the hottest thing he’s ever heard Adam say, Caleb thinks.

“I don’t know,” Caleb says. “I want to, but I also want it to last.”

Adam chokes out a laugh. “I don’t think _I_ can last, Caleb. God, the way you look right now. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you wearing that blindfold, that first time.”

Caleb sputters at him. “That was completely different!”

“I _know_ ,” Adam says. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it, you know, after.”

“Fuck, Adam,” Caleb says, a little in awe. “I can’t believe you looked at me like that when I said you were hot.”

Caleb feels the way the compliment affects Adam, feels the way it just makes everything more intense, more desperate, and suddenly, Caleb can’t stand not being able to touch Adam. He tears off the scarf and goes to Adam, takes him in his hand. Adam fucks into his fist a couple times, and then he’s gone. And then Caleb is gone as well, coming without even being touched.

They collapse in a sticky heap, trading lazy kisses. Caleb pushes Adam’s sweaty bangs out of his face and kisses his forehead. It isn’t even nine yet. They can take a nap and then do it again all before noon.

“Told you so,” Adam mumbles into his pillow. There’s a stupid smile on his face.

“Told me what,” Caleb says. There is an equally stupid smile on his own face.

Adam smiles. “Just need some practice.”

“And a blindfold,” Caleb reminds him.

Adam yawns. “And a blindfold.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/star_strung).


End file.
